I cannot believe how quickly its transpired that people can’t pick up on very, very obvious sarcasm. I genuinely can’t.
The number of homeless children has increased by 50% n 6 months.
“We should grind them up and feed them to the Rottweilers guarding the multi-billionaire’s properties so they can save money on dog food and help create more jobs!”
I feel like it’s worse here than on Reddit. I’ve joined less than a month ago, and already had things ‘explained’ to me by someone completely missing how the entire sarcasm thing works, and got several downvotes on top. On Reddit I can go months between such occurrences, and upvotes usually indicate that people get the clue.
The syntax of modern tone indicators stems from /s, which has long been used on the internet to denote sarcasm.[4] This symbol is an abbreviated version of the earlier /sarcasm, itself a simplification of </sarcasm>,[5] the form of a humorous XML closing tag marking the end of a “sarcasm” block, and therefore placed at the end of a sarcastic passage.
Just because one hasn’t been exposed to a concept doesn’t make it new. :)
It’s just Poe’s Law in action. It’s impossible to create satire that is too extreme, because there will always be someone who believes it to be a genuine post. The law was originally coined to refer to fundamentalist Christians, but was later expanded to encompass any kind of satire or sarcasm in online text.
Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that “I’m only kidding”. If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.
Jerry Schwartz, 1983, Usenet
I cannot believe how quickly its transpired that people can’t pick up on very, very obvious sarcasm. I genuinely can’t.
The number of homeless children has increased by 50% n 6 months.
“We should grind them up and feed them to the Rottweilers guarding the multi-billionaire’s properties so they can save money on dog food and help create more jobs!”
“You WHAT?!!? These are CHILDREN!!”
the /s wasn’t a thing pre covid. I dont get it,
I feel like it’s worse here than on Reddit. I’ve joined less than a month ago, and already had things ‘explained’ to me by someone completely missing how the entire sarcasm thing works, and got several downvotes on top. On Reddit I can go months between such occurrences, and upvotes usually indicate that people get the clue.
Tone Indicators (wikipedia.com) have been around for a long time.
Just because one hasn’t been exposed to a concept doesn’t make it new. :)
It’s just Poe’s Law in action. It’s impossible to create satire that is too extreme, because there will always be someone who believes it to be a genuine post. The law was originally coined to refer to fundamentalist Christians, but was later expanded to encompass any kind of satire or sarcasm in online text.
It’s been around a looooong time, certainly well before covid.